Promoting Healing and Resilience in People with Cancer: A Nursing Perspective

Detailed Table of Contents
PART 1Stress, healing and resilience in the whole person with cancer
Chapter 1. Introduction My earliest memories about cancer and healing were derived from a true story my father once told me. He was an ENT surgeon working at an academic hospital in the early 1950s when a curious event concerning one of his patients, occurred. A priest had made an appointment to see my father because of a chronic problem with hoarseness that had befuddled previous doctors. My father located a tumour of the larynx. As per the protocol of the newly established hospital tumour board my father presented the diagnostic evidence, and the board members fully concurred with his diagnosis. A cancer diagnosis was dire in those days, so the evening before the surgery, my father dropped by the priest’s hospital room with the nurse-in -charge. The priest was praying, but stopped on seeing his surgeon and the nurse. My father who was not particularly religious, but respectful of the priest’s devotion to his faith, asked if they could all pray together, which they did in the priest’s room. They were three individuals from different faiths praying to their own higher Being, encompassing the priest with their presence, caring and support. The next morning, my father and the medical residents started the operation. But they soon discovered to their amazement that the tumour had disappeared. It was inexplicable. When I have shared this story with nursing students it has been met, unsurprisingly, with the highest degree of skepticism. A couple of students have had the courage to say what I am sure many others were thinking: that it could be explained away by poor diagnostic tools in those days or medical incompetence! Still, it was equally difficult to dismiss, out of hand, the diagnostic capabilities of a group of surgeons working at an eminent university hospital in Montreal, all members of the Tumour Board, who had arrived at the same conclusion. It was a mystery. Years later, doing research for this book I came across a scientific review of the placebo effect in oncology, now recognized as an innate healing effect, triggered by strongly held cognitive expectations for a positive clinical outcome. Based on WHO criteria, the review reported that the cancer tumours were significantly reduced in about 2.4% or 10 out of 375 patients from 10 trials (Chvetzoff & Tannock, 2003). From a scientific perspective, it was an unimpressive result to be normally discounted out of hand. Yet the finding left open the possibility for the medically inexplicable. Although humans throughout history have been known to heal physical and psychic wounds, it is only recently that medical scientists have come to realize that strongly held human beliefs can trigger innate processes of healing via various physiological pathways such as the reward system, down regulating the stress response system, enabling the re emergence of healing processes that also enhance cell -mediated immunity, a critical anti cancer defense (Colloca & Barsky, 2020; Dutcher & Creswell, 2018). Healing and health in the whole person have been much revered core concepts of the Nursing discipline, since Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing, which was published over 100 years ago (Skretkowicz, 2010). Nightingale’s scientific observations suggested that distressed patients possessed an innate ability to heal or restore wholeness, when certain environmental conditions, such as uninterrupted sleep, a clean, restful or quiet environment, and a caring and thoughtful approach were implemented. These observations led her to